“Despite what you may hear, the chances of intentional voter fraud changing the result of an election are so rare, even our calculators couldn’t calculate them.
The chances of getting struck by lightning are about one in a million, and you have about a one in 3.75 million chance of being eaten by a shark. Intentional voter fraud is even less common, and the chances of intentional voter fraud changing the outcome of an election in the US are about as common as getting struck by lightning while being eaten by a shark in the parking lot of a Nebraska Captain D’s.
So yes, let’s talk about voter fraud.
We are almost guaranteed to see lots of claims from losing candidates in the coming days that the vote was rigged or that noncitizens are voting, or that ballots are being stuffed, harvested, or changed.
But in reality, voter fraud in the US is rare. And voter fraud that actually steals an election is non-existent.
The danger, of course, is that while the liar knows they’re lying, the lie feels true to the people who believe them, causing good faith but misplaced doubt in the integrity of the election.
That distrust can be used to sow chaos and even violence.
So here are some things to know about actual voter fraud:
- There are almost as many large studies showing how rare voter fraud is as there are cases of voter fraud in the country, let alone North Carolina.
- Several separate studies showed that between 2000 and 2024, there were fewer than 500 cases of confirmed voter fraud nationwide out of billions of votes cast.
- Attempted voter fraud does happen, but many of those instances are from mistakes, either from an election worker or the voter, and not part of a conspiracy.
For example, North Carolina doesn’t allow felons to vote until they are completely done with their sentences, parole, and probation. But for a time, they could vote as long as they were not in jail. That changed. It’s confusing. So if a felon who can’t vote but genuinely thinks they can tries to vote, that counts in the statistics as attempted voter fraud.
If someone tries to turn in an absentee ballot for a friend, which is against the law, that adds to the figure.
There are procedures and policies in place to catch these attempts, whether they’re innocent mistakes or part of a dubious plot, and the system works.
Want more proof?
An audit of NC’s election results in 2016 found two cases of someone trying to vote using the name of another person.
The Heritage Foundation, the same conservative group that helped write Trump’s Project 2025, keeps a database of all convictions in each state stemming from voter fraud or attempted voter fraud. They found only 123 cases in North Carolina since 1986. Already in the 2024 election, more than 4.4 million votes have been cast in the state.
That is how rare voter fraud actually is.
So don’t get distracted by false claims by bad actors, or let empty air on social media dissuade you from voting or from trusting that your legal vote was counted and matters.
